THE EARLIEST PLANTS. 787 



coated confections, such as sugared almonds, pistachios, and perfumed 

 cherry-kernels, are now generally made on a large scale by machinery, 

 as follows : The almonds, we will say, are placed in spherical copper 

 pans over a hot fire, and a heavy sirup allowed slowly to drip over 

 them. The pans are heated by steam passing through coils of pipe, 

 and are kept in continual oscillation ; the water of the sirup quickly 

 flies off in vapor, leaving the almonds covered with crystals of sugar. 



The fruit-pastes sold at candy-shops are prepared by reducing the 

 fruit — be it peach, orange, or quince — to a kind of marmalade, mixed 

 with the exact amount of sugar required. The roots of the marsh- 

 mallow are not often used nowadays in the compounding of the popu- 

 lar paste of that name. This is owing to the unpleasant taste of the 

 roots. The juice or jelly of the apple is employed instead. The other 

 ingredients are gum arable, the beaten whites of eggs, and flavoring — 

 the whole thickly dusted with powdered starch. 



Chocolate caramels are made of gelatin, dairy cream, sugar, and 

 chocolate. The delicate molasses chips made for fastidious consumers 

 of confections are compounded of sugar and a little molasses for 

 flavor ; their brittleness is simply due to the fact that the sirup ia 

 boiled to the brittle or "crack" des^ree. 



THE EAELIEST PLANTS.* 



By Sib WILLIAM DAWSON. 



THE knowledge of fossil plants and of the history of the vegetable 

 kingdom has, until recently, been so fragmentary that it seemed 

 hopeless to attempt a detailed treatment of the subject. Our stores 

 of knowledge have, however, been rapidly accumulating in recent 

 years, and we have now arrived at a stage when every new discovery 

 serves to render useful and intelligible a vast number of facts previ- 

 ously fragmentary and of uncertain import. 



Oldest of all the formations known to geologists, and representing 

 perhaps the earliest rocks produced after our earth had ceased to be a 

 molten mass, are the hard, crystalline, and much-contorted rocks 

 named by the late Sir W. E. Logan Laurentian, and which are largely 

 developed in the northern parts of North America and Europe, and in 

 many other regions. So numerous and extensive, indeed, are the ex- 

 posures of these rocks, that we have good reason to believe that they 

 underlie all the other formations of our continents, and are even 

 world-wide in their distribution. In the lower part of this great sys- 

 tem of rocks, which, in some places at least, is thirty thousand feet in 

 thickness, we find no traces of the existence of any living thing on the 



* From the " Geological History of Plants,'' published by D. Appleton & Co., " Inter- 

 national Scientific Series," vol. Ixi. 



